When agencies like the SF Municipal Transportation Agency want to implement protected bike lanes, they must take a legal risk since Caltrans hasn’t approved such designs, and design exceptions require “a painful and time-consuming process,” says the report, produced by the State Smart Transportation Initiative.

“Caltrans’ peculiar standards on bicycle facilities even pertain to locally owned streets, precluding some active transportation initiatives,” the report says. “The agency and department should support, or propose if no bill is forthcoming, legislation to end the archaic practice of imposing state rules on local streets for bicycle facilities.”

In a statement, TransForm said the report “offers a refreshingly candid and detailed critique, and more importantly points to a host of critical reforms.”

“The report recommends the direction come ‘from the top down and outside in,’ to avoid the long-standing status quo at Caltrans where bottom-up planning via staff just leads to ‘the culture endorsing itself,'” said TransForm.

Stuart Cohen, TransForm’s executive director and a member ofSecretary Kelly’s CA Transportation Infrastructure Priorities workgroup, said that “this is not the first report slamming Caltrans” but that the critical difference comes from the “tremendous leadership” of Governor Brown and Kelly, who commissioned the review.

“We asked for an honest assessment because we are committed to modernizing Caltrans and improving transportation for all Californians,” Kelly said in a statement.

Caltrans Director Malcolm Dougherty issued a statement saying that “we see this as a tremendous opportunity to reassess our priorities and improve our performance.”

“We have some internal reforms already underway so we can hit the ground running,” he said.

Although Caltrans has issued reports acknowledging the need to re-calibrate its approach to favor non-automotive travel in cities, implementing the culture change has proven to be easier said than done. The report notes that “one senior staff member… told us that bicycle and pedestrian facilities are not part of Caltrans’ mission.”

“Most of the recommendations are not simple check-the-box action items, but calls for hard work of collaborating, rethinking and establishing a new course,” said SSTI reviewers.

Seleta Reynolds, section leader for the SFMTA’s Livable Streets Division, told People for Bikes it’s about time that Caltrans adapt to the transportation practices of the 21st century. “When Caltrans first put in the requirement that cities follow their Highway Design Manual for bikeways, even on local streets, it was for good reason,” she said. “The state of the practice around designing for bikes was just developing, and it was a reliable way to make sure that people wouldn’t build sub-standard facilities. These days, though, that need no longer exists.”

So far, the SFMTA has taken some bold steps in challenging Caltrans standards with protected bike lanes, as CA Bike Coalition Executive Director Dave Snyder told the SF Bay Guardian yesterday. “San Francisco is technically breaking the law because they have the best traffic engineers in the state and a good City Attorney’s Office and they know they can defend it in court if they have to,” Snyder said. “Most places in the state won’t do that.”

CalBike is backing Assemblymember Phil Ting’s AB 1193, “which would legalize and set design standards for cycletracks,” according to the Bay Guardian. The bill cleared the Assembly on Wednesday and next goes to the Senate.

The SSTI report recommends some initial steps for Caltrans to get out of the way of municipalities who want to implement modern designs:

Caltrans should give designers the option of using NACTO urban design standards in metro areas. (The SFMTA formally adopted the NACTO guide as a reference manual last week.)

Caltrans should generally rethink its approach to facilities in metro areas and town centers.

California’s state DOT, the report says, needs to realize that the approach to designing highways doesn’t make any sense in cities:

Caltrans grew up with the idea it was moving travelers between cities, but now most of its facilities provide access between local destinations … The policies and standards in metro areas and towns should be very different than those for facilities in low-density rural areas; where the latter may legitimately focus on speed and throughput of motor vehicles (though not to the extent that they induce new travel and low-density development), the former should put pedestrian, bicyclist and livability concerns before auto-mobility. Narrower lanes, slower speeds, and pedestrian amenities should all be the default.

Jerry Brown commissioned this report, so I hope he will act on it. However, so far his record on bicycling issues is a bit spotty. There hasn’t been appropriate prioritization of bicycling infrastructure in budgeting, and his baffling stance on give-me-3 came off very aloof.

djconnel

Aloof? That’s generous. I don’t think Aaron is quite fair to the California Highway Design Manual chapter 1000. It’s hardly pro-car, even if Caltrans clearly is. It’s guidelines for class III bike paths, for example a 40 kph to 50 kph design speed, seem to be widely ignored, since Caltrans doesn’t care about bike paths. My experience with SF’s separated bike lanes (an oxymoron under CHDM, but that’s okay) is mixed: they work only where cars don’t make right hand turns. On eastern Cesar Chavez, for example, every intersection feels like it could be my last, but on Alemany, they’re fine. I’m glad the experiments are happening, but the key really is to slow down the cars.

thielges

I hope that this action eventually allows cities to assert complete streets needs over freeway access Level of (auto) Service. Today Caltrans trumps local authorities at freeway interchanges, leaving pedestrians and cyclists with poor facilities. One notable abomination is the Hamilton Ave / I-880 interchange (http://goo.gl/maps/4ALhF). Here eastbound cyclists on Hamilton need to position themselves in the center of 5 lanes because the rightmost two lanes become dedicated on-ramps to 880. If that weren’t bad enough the lanes are so narrow you need to ride in the center and take the lane. Once past the freeway interchange you pass a series of more dedicated right turn lanes meaning that cyclists are floating in the center of heavy traffic for nearly a half mile between Sylmar and Bascom. Campbell’s suggestion to cyclists: dismount and use the sidewalk. In other words there is no accommodation for cyclists for this half mile segment of Hamilton Ave, the only street that spans the Los Gatos Creek, I-880, and the railway for a distance of a mile and a half.

Gezellig

This is a tentatively encouraging development–but I will truly rejoice the day that Caltrans endorses designs such as the following:

Though I somehow doubt such designs will be even close to being considered until some community in California does a demo (perhaps à la the Berkshire cycletrack roundabout demo in the UK, which also currently does not consider such designs street-legal: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-22347184).

I wonder what the provisions would be in any upcoming Caltrans guidelines allowing for at least the possibility of “experimental” (because apparently decades of success in the Netherlands don’t count because Not America) demos like this.

Can we set up a demo in some large underutilized parking lot somewhere and show that it works?